Soul Journeys

Live Oak, March 18, 2007

Rev. Kathleen Ellis

“Everybody’s got soul! Everybody doesn’t have the same culture to draw from, but everybody’s got soul.” So says the Godfather of Soul James Brown, who left this world on Christmas Day, but who continues to inspire and inform a wide range of musical styles from “gospel and blues to funk, rock, Afro-pop, disco and eventually rap.” On the rhythm and blues charts, 98 of his songs were listed in the top 40, and 17 of them reached number 1. Forty years, 800 songs in his repertoire, the man had soul to spare. (http://www.godfatherofsoul.com/man/biography.html)

Soul brother, soul sister, soulmate, soul music, soul food, soul collage, Soul Force: how do you describe something that speaks to you in an intangible way and touches you at your core?

Merriam-Webster’s first definition of a soul is “the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life.”

A group of Live Oak women will be taking a Journey to the Soul on their retreat in April. Doris Adams will be guiding them in a technique called SoulCollage®. In this process, a person selects images that speak to her or him in some fundamental way. My understanding is that

SoulCollage® is a creative process by which you make your own deck of cards using selected images and putting them together into a meaningful collage. Each collage card represents one aspect of your personality or Soul; or you in relation to your family, community, and world; or you in relation to your dreams, symbols, and Spirit. The cards are used intuitively for self-discovery and to explore life's questions. [Author Seena B. Frost, M. Div, M.A., earned her degrees at Yale Divinity School and Santa Clara University, and is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California. [http://www.soulcollage.com/home/index.php]

It’s a combination of psychology and spiritual work. When you get in touch with your soul, you may discover intense and emotional excitement. There are a number of instances when I have experienced this kind of intensity. They seem to boil down to at least four circumstances: place, time, experience, and insight. I’ll share examples of each and leave it to you to find your own soul connections.

Place can grow a soul. In 1999, my husband Jon Montgomery and I were privileged to travel to Transylvania with an international group of Unitarians and Universalists. At least half of our group of 28 was German. There were half a dozen each from the United Kingdom and the United States, and one each from South Africa, Argentina, Prague, and Australia. Our bus driver and the tour guide were Hungarian, and one of the Germans also translated everything into German.

Transylvania is a place steeped in history. The land has been a political prize, switched back and forth between Hungary and Rumania, depending on who was in power, but it has always been ethnically Hungarian. In the latest switch the Paris Peace Treaty at the end of World War II voided the Nazi boundaries: Northern Transylvania was returned to Rumania, which became Communist.

Religiously speaking, Transylvania was a center for Unitarian theology. In the 16th century, [Zapolyta Janos] the King of Transylvania was married to Isabella, an educated young princess from Poland. At the time, Transylvania was a buffer state between the Islamic Ottoman Empire and the Christian Holy Roman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. The Catholic king was in a delicate position among the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans, and even the Pope, but he tolerated the influx of German citizens with their Lutheran religion.

A young Catholic priest, Ferenc Dávid, had gone to Wittenburg, Germany to study, and came back to Transylvania as a Lutheran. In due time, he was appointed Court Preacher.

Queen Isabella gave birth to a son Zsigmond Janos, who was only a year old when his father died. People were now curious about the religious upbringing of this child: would he be Catholic or Lutheran? Isabella had no desire to alienate either side, so she famously issued a new policy in 1557: “Faith is a gift of God and no one should be punished on account of it." Not only would there be some protection for her son’s throne, but both religions would continue to coexist peacefully.

The court preacher Ferenc Dávid continued to study religion, and when he examined the writings of John Calvin, he became a Calvinist. His charisma and influence within the Court helped establish and spread Calvinism in Transylvania. He became tutor for the young prince, and at some point he became aware of the writings of Michael Servetus. Servetus had made quite a stir with his inflammatory theses On the Errors of the Trinity. Dávid subsequently became Unitarian, and entire villages followed him, including the Crown Prince.

At the age of 24, now as King, Zsigmond firmly established his mother’s policy of tolerance. Freedom of Religion took root in his Edict of Toleration, which meant that Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Unitarians were equally recognized by the State in 1568. Our one and only Unitarian king said, “We need not think alike to love alike.”

Unfortunately, King Zsigmond was mortally wounded in a hunting accident a couple of years later when his carriage overturned. When he died in 1571, a Catholic king ascended the throne. For a time, religious freedom was preserved, so long as everyone prayed and baptized in the name of Jesus, and provided that there were no innovations in the teachings. Dávid, ever the curious student of religion, was eventually imprisoned for blasphemy and innovation, and he died in a dungeon—a cold, damp cave in Deva in 1579. (Our Transylvanian Roots: An adult education course in 3 sessions by the Rev. Ruth Ellen Gibson)

Fast forward more than 400 years: I stood with my new international friends in front of that dungeon. A monument with a plaque in several languages, including English, acknowledges Dávid as the founder and martyr of Unitarianism in Transylvania. Our German friends conducted a worship service they called “Building Bridges,” to celebrate our common Unitarian history. In that place, my soul was fed. …………….

I believe that time can grow a soul. In 1987 thousands of people participated in the Harmonic Convergence with prayers and meditation around the clock. Somehow based on the Mayan calendar, this was supposed to be the beginning of a new age of peace and harmony.

A dozen years later the year was 1999 and the world was watching the clock on New Year’s Eve. Although the millennium really didn’t begin until 2001, most people were rather excited that the calendar’s odometer was turning. Jon and I went downtown to join the giant celebration hosted by the City of Austin. There were thousands of people dancing in the streets at 6th and Congress, and as midnight approached the countdown commenced. Meanwhile, we had set the video recorder at home, where each hour, a new time zone in the world was featured as it celebrated the New Year in a unique fashion. For 24 hours the world turned, the odometer clicked, and life was good.

Rarely is there such a time when people across barriers of ethnicity, nationality, and culture have such a common focus. At that time, my soul was fed. …………….

I believe that experience can grow a soul. It happens in part because of the time and place of our birth. In my family, my younger brother was emotionally disturbed and later diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. Our cousin his same age was born with Down syndrome. So from an early age, I absorbed a kind of sensitivity to mental and physical challenges both at home and in the world at large.

Other soulful experiences came about as a function of life passages. Major passages in my own life include leaving home, marriage, giving birth, going through a painful divorce, celebrating my ordination, then remarriage, grieving the death of many family members, and serving each unique ministry as it came along. My soul has been fed through joy and sorrow, adversity and triumph. Through experience, my soul was fed. …………….

I also believe that insight can grow a soul, where the mind finally understands what the spirit already knows. I think I’ve told the story here of my experience at All States Encampment in North Carolina. As a Senior Girl Scout, I was privileged to be selected for this international experience. Girls traveled from all over the United States and around the world. There were four troops of four patrols each. Every patrol had at least two international Girl Guides, who opened my young eyes to a world I had scarcely noticed before.

I was a naïve teenager from Shreveport, Louisiana, in the late 60s, and the country was embroiled in a struggle over Civil Rights. My family was a typical Southern family. Even though I wondered as a kid why Black people were not allowed to swim in the public pool, I was also taught to resent the so-called “outside agitators” who came down from the North to stir up trouble in the South.

With that background, I was suddenly transported into a situation where the Yankees and the Confederate holdovers brought our Girl Scout training together with a clash of opinions about civil rights. Around the campfire late one night, some of the girls started singing, “We Shall Overcome.” It was a song I had been taught to hate because it meant the end of the South as I knew it.

But in that moment, surrounded by the beautiful mountains and trees and new friends, my mind and soul suddenly came together. Racism was wrong. Segregation was wrong. I was wrong.

…… Insight fed my soul as tears streamed down my face. …………….

There are countless stories of soul journeys through place, time, experience, and insight. The Austin American-Statesman recently ran a major story about Margaret Hoffman, a local peace activist who is also known as the “Tree Lady.” Hoffman lived through the horrors of World War II in Germany. After the Nazis burst into her home and terrorized the family, her parents divorced in hopes of saving them from retaliation against her mother’s Jewish faith. Her mother was arrested and sent to Theresienstadt where she died of diphtheria in 1944.

Hoffman has a picture of herself in 1944 when she was 18 years old. “How is it possible,” she wonders, that the girl in that snapshot is smiling?

Hoffman “can’t help but notice, now, that the coral necklace she’s wearing in the snapshot belonged to her mother—who weeks before had been deported. . . . And she can’t help but focus, now, on that navy-colored coat—a jacket that once belonged to a beloved family friend . . . who was sent to die in a concentration camp in Minsk.” [Brad Buchholz, Austin American-Statesman, March 11, 2007, section K, p. 9.}

Hoffman’s soul has grown through place, time, and experience, to insight and activism.

In choosing stories for this sermon, I have come to realize that the persistence in taking one’s own journey of the soul can in turn grow other souls. I’ll give you two examples here. The current movie Amazing Grace is based on the true story of William Wilberforce, who served in the British parliament and worked for 20 years to abolish the British slave trade. He finally succeeded in 1807; the movie was deliberately released to coincide with the 200th anniversary of this accomplishment. Wilberforce was inspired by John Newton, who had once been a slave trader until he rejected that custom.

Years later Newton was ordained as a priest in the Church of England and wrote many hymns for weekly worship, including “Amazing Grace.” Wilberforce had attended Newton’s church as a child, and became reacquainted in his 20s as an abolitionist member of Parliament. Newton urged the young man to continue the struggle. For 20 years, Wilberforce relentlessly submitted anti-slavery bills and he also collected 390,000 signatures to support his cause.

Another example is an ongoing effort in Transylvania to promote sustainable economic development. It’s called Project Harvest Hope. The first project was a response to the villagers in Okland, who said what they most wanted was to control their own bread supply. A flourmill was begun in Okland, Transylvania, with the assistance of their Unitarian Universalist partner church in Oakland, California. This led to the creation of the bakery, which produced 6000 loaves of bread a month at its maximum output. Although the bakery is no longer in operation, the flourmill remains available for village use.

A model dairy farm is intended to improve the quality and quantity of milk produced in the Homorod valley. The cooperative dairy farm began operations in October, 2001. Funds contributed through Project Harvest Hope helped pay for the barn, equipment and stock.

A third project is to study ways to include women in economic development. Some of them have resorted to going into Hungary illegally to find work. Harvest Hope is teaching women how to raise dairy cows so they can earn enough money to stay in their villages year ‘round.

None of this was possible during the tyrannical rule of Ceausescu. Many villages were bulldozed and peasants were moved into blocks of apartments in the cities, as part of his "urbanization" and "industrialization" programs. Other villages were flooded when a dam was built to create a recreational lake and reservoir. We visited an abandoned Unitarian church that is now sitting in about 3 feet of water from that lake.

The land was turned into collective farms, and farmers were ordered into factory work. It has taken years of reeducation for peasants to relearn farming for economic stability.

Right now, private developers are trying to buy Unitarian land. Partner churches in North America and around the world have made a real difference in Transylvania. Through sustained effort they have succeeded in growing their own souls. Here’s what one reported:

“What’s black and white and caused much excitement at the Unitarian Society of New Haven. Why…. Our first ever cow carnival and barn dance, of course! The religious education committee agreed to adopt “Project Harvest Hope” as a service project. . . . Our goal was to raise enough money to buy a cow through Project Harvest Hope’s Dairy Barn Project. The fifth grade eagerly made and sold every one of their cow-shaped Christmas ornaments and delicious chocolate “cowpies”. The sixth-seventh grade combination class sold cheese shaped like cows. Many people got into the spirit and gave donations to the project as holiday gifts.

In 2002, everyone joined efforts to have a Cow Carnival and Barn Dance. A “dairy store” generously provided a life-size fiberglass cow as a mascot. Area merchants contributed to our “heifferts.” A live music and instruction was provided for an old fashioned barn dance. And the best part is, they raised enough money to purchase two cows. I think this would be a “moooving” project for us, don’t you?

Soul: the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life. (Merriam-Webster) Place, time, experience, intuition, persistence. What is the state of your soul? Has it activated your life? May we all journey in harmony from the depths of our souls.

Amen